Tuesday, 31 July 2018

On Monday 2nd July, I wrote to Durham Constabulary to report formally the numerous criminal offences that had been committed by (at the time that they took place) the then Prime Minister Tony Blair, by the then Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, and by a large number of others, as set out in the previous week’s reports of the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament into the treatment of detainees and into the involvement of British agencies in the practice of rendition.

On Saturday 21st July, I wrote to Durham Constabulary to report formally the malfeasance in public office, the conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, and the wasting of Police time, that had been committed against me by the Leader of Durham County Council, The Honourable Councillor Dr Simon Henig CBE, and by the outgoing Director of Public Prosecutions, Mrs Alison Saunders CB.

I regret to have to say that I have still yet to receive a crime number for either of those complaints. If that remains the case on Saturday 11th August at 3:30pm, then I shall picket the surgery that is to be held at Croft View Hall in Lanchester on behalf of Laura Pidcock MP. In that event, I invite you to join me, and indeed I look forward to seeing you there.

Infans might have given the game away. But fetus, although it does mean something like "offspring" and has no specific connotation of still being in the womb, is a convenient Latin way of avoiding the obvious English word. Something similar applies to "nutrition and hydration", one Latin and the other Greek.

One refers to food, the other to water. And the withdrawal of food and water from a comatose person is not the withdrawal of medical treatment, but the intentional killing of that person. Parliament needs to legislate in order to make that clear. I need £10,000 in order to stand for Parliament with any chance of winning.

My crowdfunding page has been taken down without my knowledge or consent. But you can still email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com instead, and that address accepts PayPal.

Look, if you think that Labour could do without the publicity of re-electing Pete Willsman to its National Executive Committee, then that is a very good reason to vote for Stephen Guy instead. I am assuming that you were already going to vote for Ann Black. Plus seven of your choice from among the #JC9.

But none of the people who are whipping this up cares tuppence about anti-Semitism in Britain (exactly how much of that has any of them ever experienced?), or even very much about Israel, although its embassy is more than happy to help them out.

They care about returning to the good old days before Jeremy Corbyn, when Britain had no debate whatever on either economic or foreign policy, because their own highly contentious views on those matters were treated as Laws of Physics.

So yes, there would be bigger problems even if what they were saying were true. Poverty, for example. And pointless, never-ending wars on behalf of Saudi Arabia, which Corbyn's detractors abstained rather than condemn for its ongoing genocide in Yemen.

The Latin Patriarchate in Jerusalem on Monday issued a statement slamming the newly passed nation-state law, which it called discriminatory, and said it violated both Israeli and international law.

The Patriarchate, which represents the Roman Catholic Church in the Holy Land, called on all Christians in Israel to protest the law that reserves the right to national-self determination exclusively for Israel’s Jewish citizens.

“The law fails to provide any constitutional guarantees for the rights of the indigenous and other minorities living in the country,” a Patriarchate statement said.

“Palestinian citizens of Israel, constituting 20 percent are flagrantly excluded from the law.”

The law, passed earlier this month, has roiled the country, amid mounting criticism of provisions that many decry as exclusionary toward minority groups.

Supporters of the law see it as necessary to balance Israel’s Jewish and democratic characters, as well as enshrine into law the country’s status as a Jewish state.

“It is beyond conception that a Law with constitutional effect ignores an entire segment of the population as if its members never existed,” the church said.

“It sends an unequivocal signal to the Palestinian citizens of Israel, to the effect that in this country they are not at home.”

The church said the law contravened the United Nations Resolution 181 that established the State of Israel, and Israel’s own Declaration of Independence.

It also called on Christians to protest the law. “The Christian citizens of Israel have the same concerns as any other non-Jewish communities with respect to this Law.”

“They call upon all citizens of the State of Israel who still believe in the basic concept of equality among citizens of the same nation, to voice their objection to this law and the dangers emanating thereof to the future of this Country,” it said.

In addition to defining Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people, the law downgrades Arabic from an official language to one with “special” status, declares that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel, sets the Hebrew calendar as the official calendar of the state, and recognizes Independence Day, days of remembrance, and Jewish holidays.

The government has faced widespread international and local opposition to the law. However, within Israel most of the dissent has focused on the exclusion of the Druze.

Unlike Arab Israelis, members of minority groups such as the Druze and Circassians are subject to Israel’s mandatory draft and serve in large numbers alongside Jewish soldiers in some of the military’s most elite units.

They also serve in the police and Border Police gendarmeries.

Several lawmakers within Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition have pushed for changes to the law that would grant the Druze a special status of their own, but Netanyahu has insisted he will not amend the legislation.

The number of Jews is this country is lower than the number of people who die of old age every year. It is lower than the number of people who voted to re-elect Jeremy Corbyn as Leader of the Labour Party in 2016.

If media London imagines, as it clearly does, that Britain is between 20 and 30 per cent Jewish, a figure of somewhere between 13 million and 20 million people, then that says everything that needs to be said about media London, but nothing at all about anything else.

The definition of anti-Semitism by the self-styled "International Holocaust Memorial Alliance" has in any case been overtaken by the enactment of the Israeli Nation-State Law, which itself morally compels the Labour Party to proscribe Labour Friends of Israel. There were very well-placed Labour friends of apartheid South Africa when Corbyn was protesting outside its embassy, but even then there was no specific organisation in that cause.

64 per cent of British Jews voted Conservative in 2015, when the Leader of the Labour Party was Jewish. The three Jewish newspapers that united their infinitesimal circulations against Corbyn last week have all been viscerally hostile to the Labour Party, simply as such, either for many years, or forever.

The Board of Deputies is representative of no one very much at all these days, and it is run by open Trump supporters, so Pete Willsman is right about that. The "Jewish Leadership Council" is a last little bit of astroturfing by the once mighty but now collapsed Conservative Party machine in London.

The authority of the "Chief Rabbi" is acknowledged in any way by scarcely half of British Jews, including neither Jonathan Freedland nor Melanie Phillips (who used to scorn Steven Rose's Orthodox upbringing on The Moral Maze). The present incumbent's theory that a nineteenth-century political ideology is fundamental to Judaism would be, and is rejected, by a large and growing proportion even of that half.

More than 15 weeks after I had again been due to stand trial, I now no longer have a trial date, even though it is rightly a criminal offence to fail to attend one's trial.

Had I been tried, as expected, on 6th December, then, even had I been convicted, I would already have been released, since I would by now have served even the whole of a wildly improbable six month sentence.

The legal persecution of me, which has been going on for over a year, was initiated only in order to deter me from seeking public office or to prevent my election to it, and its continuation is only to one or both of those ends. Amnesty International is on the case.

Until there is anything to add to it, then this post will appear here every day that the post is delivered.

The Leader of Durham County Council, Simon Henig, was so afraid that I was going to be elected to that authority, that he faked a death threat against himself and dozens of other Councillors.

Despite the complete lack of evidence, that matter is still being pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service as part of the attempt by the sacked Director of Public Prosecutions, Alison Saunders, to secure a Labour seat in one or other House of Parliament.

If I am wrong, then let Henig and Saunders sue me. Until they do, then this post will appear here every day that the post is delivered.

Monday, 30 July 2018

According to The Economist, polygamy is a key factor in civil wars and conflict. How convenient to blame it all on ‘the natives’ and their ‘backward’ customs, obscuring the role of the US and its allies in destabilizing regions.

In the 1930 Marx Brothers comedy Animal Crackers, Groucho Marx proposes to two women at the same time. One protests: “But that's bigamy!” Groucho replies: “Yes and that's big-a-me, too. It's big of all of us. Let's be big for a change. I'm sick of these conventional marriages!”

We know The Economist isn’t a great fan of Karl Marx, and it’s doubtful it would approve of Groucho much either – or at least the idea of him taking two wives.

You see, it would probably lead to armed conflict.

Forget the illegal invasion of Iraq, which led to one million deaths and turned the Middle East into a cauldron. Forget too the mass casualties of two World Wars. It’s polygamy that we should be focusing on to explain violence in the world. Run for your wives? More like run for your lives.

It’s fair to say that The Economist, the weekly Bible of Western neoliberal capitalism, is very keen that we get the Polygamy = Wars thesis. “Polygamy is still common in Africa, the Islamic world and parts of Asia. It makes civil war more likely,” we were told on Twitter.

This follows an article entitled ‘Why Polygamy breeds civil war,’ published on March 19, 2018, a piece by The Economist’s Foreign Editor Robert Guest entitled ‘Big Love and Big War,’ on January 12, 2018, which cited a 2009 study by Satoshi Kanazawa of the LSE, and another piece entitled ‘The link between polygamy and war,’ published in the 2017 Christmas edition.

“Wherever it is widely practised, polygamy (specifically polygyny, the taking of multiple wives) destabilizes society, largely because it is a form of inequality which creates an urgent distress in the hearts, and loins, of young men,” the last piece states.

The neoliberal Economist, which has championed all the Thatcherite reforms of the past 40 years, concerned with inequality? Why, you could have knocked me down with a feather!

The article also says polygamy “is one of the reasons why the Arab Spring erupted, why the jihadists of Boko Haram and Islamic State were able to conquer swathes of Nigeria, Iraq and Syria, and why the polygamous parts of Indonesia and Haiti are so turbulent.”

It adds: “Polygamous societies are bloodier, more likely to invade their neighbours and more prone to collapse than others.”

The Economist doesn’t blame polygamy for the recent heat-wave, but that’s probably coming up in next week’s edition.
By way of evidence the magazine states that:

“The taking of multiple wives is a feature of life in all of the 20 most unstable countries on the Fragile States Index compiled by the Fund for Peace, an NGO.”

But if we look at said Index we see that a large number of the ‘top 20’ have been affected directly or indirectly by Western destabilization campaigns, or even – in case of Yemen (4), Iraq (10), Syria (6), Afghanistan (9) – by Western alliance invasion or bombing.

This is the ‘link’ that The Economist won’t mention because it has largely been in favor of these ‘interventions.’ Who can ever forget the way the magazine whitewashed the Iraq invasion with its ‘Sincere Deceivers’ cover featuring the warmongers Bush and Blair?

South Sudan and Sudan feature heavily in The Economist’s arguments – but again, the US role in sponsoring oil-rich South Sudan’s secession and creating instability in the region is not mentioned.

As for the ‘conquering’ by Boko Haram and Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) of ‘vast swathes’ of Nigeria, Iraq and Syria, who do we blame for that?

“The situation in Nigeria is also a result of war, in this case the Boko Haram insurgency – an insurgency which owes its massive spread in recent years directly to the NATO destruction of Libya, which opened up the country’s weapons dumps to Boko Haram and its partners.”

A destruction of Libya which The Economist described as “a modest win for liberal internationalism.”

The Iraq War, also backed by The Economist, led directly to the rise of IS, while Syria whose polygamy rates are ‘N/A’ in the index, became a ’fragile state’ only because of the regime change operations of the West and its regional allies.

The more we analyse the global situation a very clear pattern emerges.

The US and its allies have targeted a succession of independently-minded resource-rich countries in strategically important parts of the world and, where they haven’t been able to directly invade, they’ve fomented civil wars to further their own economic and geopolitical interests.

A classic example was the break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

Unilateral secessions were encouraged from the republic, in contravention of Article 5 of the Yugoslav constitution.

Separatist politicians and armed militias were backed, even if they were once classified as terrorist groups, like the Kosovo Liberation Army.

Attempts by local actors to sort things out peacefully were sabotaged, for example when US Ambassador Warren Zimmerman persuaded Bosnian separatist Alija Izetbegovic to renege on his signing of the EU-sponsored 1992 Lisbon Accord.

Then when things got out of hand, NATO powers could use the violence on the ground as an excuse for ‘intervention’ – with the aim of bringing the Balkans under full economic and military control.

In November 2012, The New York Times ran an article on how the ‘Americans who helped free Kosovo’ were returning there as ‘entrepreneurs’ to bid for privatized assets.

“So many former American officials have returned to Kosovo for business — in coal and telecommunications, or for lobbying and other lucrative government contracts — that it’s hard to keep them from colliding,” the paper reported.

The pattern has been repeated across the world.

In 2006, a cable from US Ambassador to Syria William Roebuck discussed “potential vulnerabilities” of the Bashar Assad government and the “possible means to exploit them.”

One of the “possible means,” as I noted here, was to seek to divide the Shiite and Sunni communities in Syria.

The US and its regional allies have flooded Syria with weapons and foreign jihadists in pursuance of their objectives. But hey, let’s blame N/A polygamy figures for Syria’s current ‘fragile state’, shall we?

It’s a very similar story in Afghanistan.

The late US diplomat and former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski was the architect of the US policy of backing Islamist fighters to try to “bleed” the Soviet Union, which supported the secular, left-wing government in Kabul.

As I commented in a previous OpEd, Zbig’s policy had far-reaching global consequences: “The Taliban and Al-Qaeda grew out of the Mujahedeen and then many years later, the US led an invasion of Afghanistan to try and get rid of the Taliban.”

In 1998 Brzezinski was asked: “Do you regret having supported Islamic fundamentalism, which has given arms and advice to future terrorists?”

He replied: “What was more important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some agitated Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?”

Today, we’re expected to put full blame on those ‘agitated Muslims’ and forget who got them so worked up and so well-armed.

We’re meant to see conflicts and civil wars in close-up and not in long shot. Where Boko Haram and IS get their weaponry and funding is not a question we’re supposed to ask.

Instead, let’s focus on cultural factors, ok? Let’s talk about marriage customs and not the numbers on the side of spent missile cases.

None of this, it must be said, denies agency to local actors, or excuses them from war crimes and atrocities committed once hostilities begin.

Nor is it a defense of polygamy. It’s up to each country to decide its own laws regarding marriage.

But it’s an intellectual cop-out to write about the world’s conflict zones and not mention the role that the West has played in fuelling the fires and the commercial interests that lie behind the wars and which profit greatly from them.

“Wars, conflicts – it‘s all business,” sighs the anti-hero Monsieur Verdoux at the end of Chaplin’s classic 1947 film.

It’s no great surprise that the organ espousing the ideology of elite Western business interests prefers to blame something else.

There has been some interesting talk among the right sort of people on Twitter over the last couple of days.

First, there is the sense that those of you with nine votes for the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party ought to cast one of them for Stephen Guy of the Durham Miners' Association, one for Ann Black, and the rest for seven of your choice from among the #JC9. That would be a clean sweep for supporters of Jeremy Corbyn, but not for largely young, Southern and middle-class Momentum, which is part of the movement, but which is not the whole of it.

Secondly, there is the sense that the next Leader of the Labour Party ought to be Richard Burgon, whose journey from a Leeds comprehensive school, via a Sixth Form college, Cambridge, and qualification and practice as a solicitor, to a seat in Parliament and to the Shadow Cabinet, is the kind of story of comprehensive school success that Labour needs to tell.

Thirdly, there is the sense that the legendary Liverpool trade unionist, justice campaigner and peace campaigner, Audrey White, who was once played on film by Glenda Jackson, ought to take over either as the MP for the great Bob Parry's old seat of Liverpool Riverside in place of Louise Ellman, or as the MP for Liverpool Wavertree in place of Luciana Berger.

And fourthly, there is the sense that something must be done about Jess Phillips. Specifically, only Roy Jenkins has ever been an MP for all three of Britain's largest cities of London, Birmingham and Glasgow. Much of his Stechford constituency is now in Yardley, where Phillips is the MP. But Jenkins did eventually lose his Glasgow seat to George Galloway, who has now been both a London and a Glasgow MP, as well as a Bradford one.

With its close ties both to Ireland, and to the Islamic world in general and Pakistan in particular, Birmingham is a city made for Galloway. He needs to be the next MP for Yardley. He needs to defeat Phillips in order to hold the balance of power in critical support of Corbyn and against what will still be the largely Blairite Parliamentary Labour Party.

Not that even he would be able to do that on his own, of course. As Twitter users will have seen, "The four local champions of @TAs_Durham are @davidaslindsay, his two Campaign Patrons (Alex Watson and Davey Ayre), and @OwenTemple2. @LauraPidcockMP's Political Advisor is @MrBenSellers, whose political advice has cost 472 TAs 23% of their income."

And, "Tell a room full of ordinary voters that they were about to meet two people one of whom was an MP. Bring in @LauraPidcockMP and David Lindsay and see which one they all assumed that it was. It's obvious. It's been obvious for nearly 20 years in David's case. He was bred for this."

Gosh. Well, brothers and sisters, on that note, I need £10,000 in order to stand for Parliament with any chance of winning. My crowdfunding page has been taken down without my knowledge or consent. But you can still email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com instead, and that address accepts PayPal.

"The Norway Option", or any variation on that theme, is for those who, going all the way back to the initially pro-Market Enoch Powell, have merely never liked the terms, but have never objected to the principle of British membership of the EU. Do not consider it.

Rather than any such foolish distraction, there is going to be another hung Parliament, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. I need £10,000 in order to stand for Parliament with any chance of winning.

My crowdfunding page has been taken down without my knowledge or consent. But you can still email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com instead, and that address accepts PayPal.

This is a story they don’t want you to know. Much of it had to be prised from the grip of officials in Whitehall and the local town hall.

Yet it demands to be told, because it shows how democracy and accountability are being drained from our schools, and how a surreal battle now rages over who knows what’s best for a child: the parents and teachers, or remote officials and financiers.

The school in question is Waltham Holy Cross primary in Essex. Helping on a school run last week, I found an entire small world.

It was the last day of term, and teachers joined hands to form a human arch. The bell rang and all those leaving to start secondary ran under their teachers’ arms.

Parents whooped while staff hugged overwhelmed pupils. There was barely a dry eye in the playground.
More than a school, this is a community – yet officials judge it a failure.

This version of events does not match the views held by any parent I’ve spoken to, nor does it fit the facts brought to light by numerous freedom of information requests.

Reported today in a newspaper for the first time, those requests reveal how little say parents and teachers have over the future of their children and school once it is forced to become an academy.

In 2016, the then chancellor George Osborne ordered all schools to make the same conversion. Public outrage forced the Tories to back off then, but next time this story could be about your child.

That Ofsted inspection prompted a furious letter from the headteacher and chair of governors, alleging that before the visit had even formally begun, the lead inspector told staff that “based on the previous year’s [SAT] results, our school would be inadequate … judgment had therefore been made from the very first instant”.

The private complaint reports inspectors shouting at the head, and telling staff they wouldn’t move their car away from the electric gates because “I’m Ofsted, I can park wherever I want”.

Even being told that a child with autism is in his safe space didn’t stop an inspector barging over, “sitting next to him and quizzing him on what he was doing”.

Ofsted tells me the allegations are “simply untrue”, and that “inspectors do not go into schools with a preconceived idea of what judgment the school will receive”.

Ofsted’s draft report – which only emerged through freedom of information – is shot through with errors. The headteacher is given a new surname and the number of nursery classes somehow halved.

When the report was finally published, with its “inadequate” ruling, many parents could not square it with the happy place they knew.

“The day we were told, I took my daughter into nursery – and she skipped all the way,” remembers Jayshree Tailor. “Is that a failing school?”

True, Waltham Holy Cross had been through rocky times, but over the past few months it has got a new headteacher (“fabulous”, say parents) and some vim.

This month’s SAT results for Year 6 show a remarkable double-digit improvement in reading, writing and maths.

Once absorbed by an academy, Waltham Holy Cross has no way of returning to local authority control. This is a form of outsourcing, but with even less control than a contract with Carillion.

Ignoring my other questions, Net Academies asked why I wanted to know about its top salaries.

Public interest, I replied: you’re taking taxpayers’ money to run schools. Stories of lavish pay and expenses are rife in this industry. I received no reply.

Those leading the fight against this academisation aren’t politicians or unions, but parents.

On being told in March their children’s school was going to be forcibly converted, the meeting exploded.

A group of them began firing off freedom of information requests and peppering officials with awkward emails.

They have become what one councillor from a neighbouring borough calls “the most dogged parents I have ever come across”.

For Shaunagh Roberts, it began when she first looked up Net Academies – and got a jolt. “I just sat there researching for days, wearing the same pair of pyjamas.”

She’s been told how Net Academies successfully runs four academies in Harlow, Essex. Two of Net’s seven academies in Warwickshire and Reading have been ranked “inadequate”, a third “requires improvement”.

Even as it drops three of its schools, the trust’s aim is to run 25 to 30 institutions. Waltham Holy Cross will be the latest notch.

“My kids are my world – and this school is their world,” Roberts says. “Why should Net spoil that?”

Senior staff don’t want Net either.

In April, headteacher Erica Barnett sent a heartfelt private letter to the regional schools commissioner at the Department for Education (Dfe), Sue Baldwin, who has ultimate say over her school’s fate.

If it must be an academy, Barnett says, at least let it be run by a rival local trust, Vine, which also has an “incredibly strong community feel”.

Come visit, she urges the education official: see what a special place we are. Baldwin doesn’t visit. She picks Net Academies.

And we have no idea why – despite this being a taxpayer-funded public asset, parents have been given no full reasoning for the decision. Perhaps because there is no good reason.

The DfE told me it was because Vine “did not have the same level of capacity” as Net, the group struggling with almost half its schools.

Yet the head refers to Baldwin’s “concern” about Vine being a trust of church schools, which Waltham Holy Cross is not (neither Barnett nor Vine see this as a problem).

But the letter contains another clue.

When the school got its Ofsted result months ago, Barnett writes, “the local authority told us that the director of education, Clare Kershaw, would want us only to go with [Net Academies]”.

Essex county council’s Kershaw was also a trustee with the charity New Education Trust, out of which came the Net Academies.

Both the council and the government assured me that the two were separate entities, and her interest had been properly declared. Net denies any conflict of interest.

Although he usually leaves controversial decisions to his political partners, this time Netanyahu positioned himself front and center in support of the constitutional discrimination against Israeli citizens who are not Jewish.

Netanyahu made it clear Friday to Druze leaders who asked him to amend the law that he was prepared to give the Druze economic benefits but would not change the legislation’s discriminatory wording.

On Sunday he attacked the left (“They need to do some soul-searching”), and demanded that Likud ministers “fight for the truth,” a barb at his right-wing rival Naftali Bennett, who suggested amending the law to accommodate the Druze.

Netanyahu’s position is not surprising. For years he has described the Arab citizens of Israel as a nuisance.

As finance minister, he called them a “demographic problem,” and last Election Day he posted that video in which he warned, “The Arabs are heading to the polls in droves.”

As prime minister, Netanyahu has visited Arab communities only rarely, and has never shown any interest in the culture or distress in Arab society here.

At most, he is prepared to offer “economic peace,” expressed in the transfer of budgets to Arab communities, while suppressing Arab political expression, with the Nakba Law, for example, or the state’s disregard for this minority’s history and heritage.

The vote on the law has updated the political fault line in Israel: the discrimination camp vs. the equality camp; the supporters of apartheid against the supporters of democracy.

It is true that Israel’s Arab citizens have been discriminated against since the state’s establishment by the governments on both the left and right.

But liberal basic laws and High Court of Justice rulings during the past generation advanced the drive toward equality and integrating the minority, which Netanyahu is now seeking to destroy.

The opposition, now headed by Tzipi Livni, must unite, as it did in the vote on the nation-state law, and present the public with a strong, simple message: equality.

There is no more appropriate foundation for Israel’s future as a prosperous democratic society.

Netanyahu must not be allowed to rip the Declaration of Independence to shreds and turn Israel into a whitewashed version of the occupation regime in the territories.

My world view changed forever when, after 20 years in the Foreign Office, I saw colleagues I knew and liked go along with Britain’s complicity in the most terrible tortures, as detailed stunningly in the recent Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee Report.

They also went along with keeping the policy secret, deliberately disregarding all normal record taking procedures, to the extent that the Committee noted:

131. We note that we have not seen the minutes of these meetings either: this causes us great concern. Policy discussions on such an important issue should have been minuted. We support Mr Murray’s own conclusion that were it not for his actions these matters may never have come to light.

The people doing these things were not ordinarily bad people; they were just trying to keep their jobs, comforting themselves with the thought that they were only civil servants obeying orders.

Many were also actuated by the nasty “patriotism” that grips in time of war, as we invaded Iraq and Afghanistan.

Almost nobody in the FCO stood up against the torture or against the illegal war – Elizabeth Wilmshurst, Carne Ross and I were the only ones to leave over it.

I then had the still more mortifying experience of the Foreign Office seeking to punish my dissent by bringing a series of accusations of gross misconduct – some of them criminal – against me. The people bringing the accusations knew full well they were false.

The people investigating them knew they were false from about day two. But I was put through a hellish six months of trial by media before being acquitted on all the original counts (found guilty of revealing the charges, whose existence was an official secret!).

The people who did this to me were people I knew.
I had served as First Secretary in the British Embassy in Poland, and bumped up startlingly against the history of the Holocaust in that time, including through involvement with organising the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

What had struck me most forcibly was the sheer scale of the Holocaust operation, the tens of thousands of people who had been complicit in administering it.

I could never understand how that could happen – until I saw ordinary, decent people in the FCO facilitate extraordinary rendition and torture.

Then I understood, for the first time, the banality of evil or, perhaps more precisely, the ubiquity of evil.

Of course, I am not comparing the scale of what happened to the Holocaust – but evil can operate on different scales.
I believe I see it again today.

I do not believe that the majority of journalists in the BBC, who pump out a continual stream of “Corbyn is an anti-semite” propaganda, believe in their hearts that Corbyn is a racist at all.

They are just doing their job, which is to help the BBC avert the prospect of a radical government in the UK threatening the massive wealth share of the global elite.

They would argue that they are just reporting what others say; but it is of course the selection of what they report and how they report it which reflect their agenda.

The truth, of which I am certain, is this.

If there genuinely was the claimed existential threat to Jews in Britain, of the type which engulfed Europe’s Jews in the 1930’s, Jeremy Corbyn, Billy Bragg, Roger Waters and I may humbly add myself would be among the few who would die alongside them on the barricades, resisting.

Yet these are today loudly called “anti-Semites” for supporting the right to oppose the oppression of the Palestinians.

The journalists currently promoting those accusations, if it came to the crunch, would be polishing state propaganda and the civil servants writing railway dockets.

More than 15 weeks after I had again been due to stand trial, I now no longer have a trial date, even though it is rightly a criminal offence to fail to attend one's trial.

Had I been tried, as expected, on 6th December, then, even had I been convicted, I would already have been released, since I would by now have served even the whole of a wildly improbable six month sentence.

The legal persecution of me, which has been going on for over a year, was initiated only in order to deter me from seeking public office or to prevent my election to it, and its continuation is only to one or both of those ends. Amnesty International is on the case.

Until there is anything to add to it, then this post will appear here every day that the post is delivered.

The Leader of Durham County Council, Simon Henig, was so afraid that I was going to be elected to that authority, that he faked a death threat against himself and dozens of other Councillors.

Despite the complete lack of evidence, that matter is still being pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service as part of the attempt by the sacked Director of Public Prosecutions, Alison Saunders, to secure a Labour seat in one or other House of Parliament.

If I am wrong, then let Henig and Saunders sue me. Until they do, then this post will appear here every day that the post is delivered.

Following the very welcome release of Ahed Tamimi, a deputation of British politicians needs to board a plane to Tehran, unannounced, with their smartphones in their hands so that one of them might tweet immediately before landing that they would not be leaving without Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and Abbas Edelat.

You may recall the fuss Theresa May made about getting rid of the Islamist preacher Abu Qatada.

In the end it took 11 years of legal wrangling to get this fanatic, with his very nasty opinions, out of the country.
Without her personal intervention at the end, he would probably still be here.

Why, then, is the British Government seriously considering welcoming into this country an unknown number of men who have been – I put this at its mildest – closely associated for several years with an armed faction linked to Al Qaeda, or with others perhaps even worse?

Was all the fuss about Abu Qatada just a public relations front? Or does the right hand just not know what the left hand is doing?

Here’s what is going on.

Last week the new Foreign Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, put his name to a very odd statement about a very odd event.
I think the nicest thing to say here is that Mr Hunt is a bit inexperienced.

The statement said that Britain would be ‘protecting’ a group of ‘White Helmets’, supposedly civil defence workers from Syria. That’s what they call themselves, anyway.

The 400 people involved (a quarter of them said to be ‘White Helmets’) had been caught by the sudden collapse of Islamist jihadi rebel forces in a southern corner of Syria next to the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights.

And, despite the defeated rebels being Islamist jihadi fanatics, they were mysteriously allowed to cross into Israel so that they could escape to Jordan.

Israel? Such people normally regard Israel with violent hatred, a feeling Israel returns with interest.

As far as I can discover, other defeated groups of Syrian rebels and their hangers-on have been bussed under safe conducts to the rebel-held north of Syria, under Turkish and Russian supervision. Why not this time?

Later, the Jordanian government revealed that some of them would now be resettled in Britain.

Its spokesman announced that Britain, Germany and Canada made a ‘legally binding undertaking’ to resettle them ‘within a specified period of time’ due to ‘a risk to their lives’.

Legally binding, eh?

What was this risk? What were they so worried about? Why do they need to come to Britain when the whole Arab Muslim world must presumably long to welcome these glorious, self-sacrificing heroes?

For, according to the Foreign Office, and many others, the ‘White Helmets’ are the good guys.
They like them so much they have so far spent £38.4 million of your money and mine on supporting them.

The FO is in a mess over this. It has for years been backing the Islamist rebels against the Syrian government, a policy which involves supporting exactly the sort of people we would arrest if we found them in Birmingham.

Perhaps that is why it claims the ‘White Helmets’ are ‘volunteers’ (they are often paid) and that they have ‘saved over 115,000 lives during the Syrian conflict’ and done ‘brave and selfless work’ to ‘save Syrians on all sides of the conflict.’

When I asked them to provide independent, checkable evidence for these assertions, they came up empty after three days of searching.

This is not surprising, as the ‘White Helmets’ generally operate only in areas controlled by unlovely bodies such as the Al-Nusra Front, until recently an affiliate of Al Qaeda, and the equally charming Jaish al-Islam (Army of Islam), famous for putting captured Syrian Army soldiers in cages and using them as human shields.

Independent Western observers, whether they are diplomats or journalists, can’t really go to these zones, because they are quite likely to end up very dead and probably headless.

So you can choose whether to believe the ‘White Helmets’ and their flattering picture of their own goodness, or wonder why exactly they are in such need of protection that these much-feted and saintly humanitarians are willing to be evacuated through a country that most Arab Muslims loathe and despise, rather than rely on the mercy of their own countrymen.

Is it possible (I only ask) that, while undoubtedly brilliant at public relations, and at making slick videos showing themselves rescuing wounded children, the ‘White Helmets’ are not quite as nice as they say they are?

Even the USA, which has for years (like us) helped the Syrian rebels, refused entry to the leader of the ‘White Helmets’, Raed Saleh, when he arrived at Washington’s Dulles Airport in 2016. They won’t say why.

The FO tells me that the Home Office, not them, will be vetting those chosen to come here. I hope they are careful when they do so.

I am sure that future Home Secretaries will not be grateful if any of the new arrivals turns out to have the same opinions as Abu Qatada.

In any case, it is time the British Government came clean about who it has been helping in Syria.

‘I hear people say we have to stop and debate globalisation. You might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer.” That was Tony Blair, Britain’s prime minister, in October 2005.

Two years later, in the autumn of 2007, Alan Greenspan, the former chair of the US Federal Reserve, was asked by a Swiss newspaper which candidate he was supporting in the forthcoming US presidential election. His response was striking.

How he voted did not matter, Greenspan declared, because “[we] are fortunate that, thanks to globalisation, policy decisions in the US have been largely replaced by global market forces. National security aside, it hardly makes any difference who will be the next president. The world is governed by market forces.”

Theirs is a world we have lost. To understand it, you had to believe that global markets, like the seasons, were givens. You had to believe that markets had a logic by which they ruled and that the outcome of their rule was, on the whole, benign.

You had also to believe, as Greenspan’s exception indicated, that although national security remained political, it was separable from economics. Otherwise, if economics and geopolitics were entangled, then presumably economics would be a matter for politicians, too.

In the 10 years since the financial crisis of 2008, all of those assumptions have been revealed as false. The idea that the economy is a realm beyond politics or the play of international power has been exposed as a self-serving illusion.

Donald Trump is the most spectacular manifestation of that disillusionment and the one that matters most. He is an outright nationalist, pushing against the trend of globalisation.

Trump matters because the United States affects the entire system. Brexit shocked Europe, but, as Theresa May’s government is finding to its cost, the UK’s effort to “take back control” does not mean that everyone else falls into line.

In trade and security, the UK lacks the heft, but it has shaped our era of globalisation and may still do so via one hugely significant entity: the City of London.

While Wall Street has America’s huge national economy as its hinterland, the City of London is outsized, preeminent in currencies, interest rate derivatives and global banking.

Its present role and importance was already taking shape by the late 1950s when it began to provide an offshore market for unregulated borrowing and lending.

Again, this was very much a political choice, shaped via the growth of something called the Eurodollar – a dollar held in Europe and hence, importantly, outside the jurisdiction of the Federal Reserve; a political choice enabled by the British authorities and tolerated by the Americans.

Hence it was by way of London that the offshore dollar banking industry was born, with profoundly destabilising long-term results.
In fact, the consequences were nothing less than world historic.

For the first time since the invention of money in the ancient world, no major currency was anchored to a metallic base. Money was openly acknowledged as a political creation.
The result, in the short term, was an explosion of instability, inflation and gyrating exchange rates.

It was a feast for investment bankers, both on Wall Street and in the City of London. Opec’s oil earnings added to the surge.

To avoid taxes, the money was funnelled through offshore havens, many of which were located in the former British empire, or exploited quasi-feudal entrepots such as Guernsey.

The eurodollar market was a “work-around”. By the 1980s, the push was on to achieve something more comprehensive: the wholesale liberalisation of capital movements. Regulators in London and New York, egged on by banking interests, were racing to the bottom.

By the 1990s, the City of London had ceased to be in any sense a British banking centre. After Margaret Thatcher’s Big Bang, the small merchant banks of the City were swept up by Asian, American and European competitors.

The City became, as Mervyn King quipped in 2012, the Wimbledon of the world economy. The success of British competitors was rarely, if ever, the point.

But that sporting analogy, with its suggestion of elegance and decorum, is flattering. The City of the boom years was more akin to the Premier League: brash, cosmopolitan, sucking in punters from around the world and showered with staggering amounts of money from questionable sources.

As much as it was global, local competitors were still in the game. The old City might have gone, but the big British commercial banks had not given up.

Like their European counterparts, Deutsche Bank and Paribas, like American high street banks, such as Bank of America or Citigroup, the British giants – Barclays, RBS, HBOS – wanted a slice of the global action.

It was the merger of the megabank with the financial market model – Premier League mashed with Wimbledon – that created the conditions for the comprehensive meltdown of 2008.

The crash changes everything

Gordon Brown might have to deal with rumblings on the backbenches, but in parliament his majority was solid.

In the US, whilst the Republicans became increasingly a party of sectional interests and protest, crisis fighting would fall to the Democrats.

They would have to take upon themselves the conflicts of interest and the odium that rescuing financial capitalism entailed.

At the height of the crisis, encouraged by Barack Obama’s victory, Brown tried to offer a sweeping vision of global solutions for a global age.

But the new team in Washington was not interested in a rerun of the Anglo-American condominium at Bretton Woods.

There was a global response to the crisis of 2008, but it came not in the form of a new Bretton Woods. Instead, the institutions of the American state were put behind the world’s banks and their offshore business in London and Europe.

As central bankers will hasten to tell you, the Fed’s emergency provision of dollar liquidity was no bailout. These were fully collateralised loans. It was normal lender of last resort activity, just on a very abnormal scale.

One European central banker referred to the European central banks as having become in 2008 the 13th branch of the US Federal Reserve system.

Not surprisingly, in the wake of the crisis, it was time for a rethink. Not that the basic principles of financial globalisation were questioned. (National controls on capital movements were adopted only by emerging market countries and Greece in 2015. )

But private banks are the crucial actors in global money creation and a new regulatory framework – Basel III – and tougher national rules set out to constrain their balance sheets. Large parts of the shadow banking system have been dried out.

And if finance has “deglobalised”, the geography of that retreat is telling. American banks have held their own, Asia’s new banking giants have rapidly expanded. It is the British and European banks have done the contracting.

In part, this was commercial logic, but it is also a matter of political choice. After 2008, realising the risks to which financial globalisation had exposed them, the Americans set new rules.

While Europeans were scandalised about America’s “chlorine chickens”, in the transatlantic financial talks the Americans held their noses.

Specifically, they have required European competitors such as Barclays and Deutsche Bank to provide more capital to their US operations or to leave.

Faced with the choice, both preferred to downsize.

Choosing China

The shock to the City dealt by 2008 was severe. But the City, and those who steer it, have not lost their global ambitions or their sense of historical direction. If transatlantic finance had plateaued, the future was in the east.

The “UK” bank that came through the crisis best was HSBC. Its strategy of straddling between the City of London and Hong Kong was the future.

In 2013, the City began marketing itself as the offshore centre for China. Again, this was driven in part by commercial logic, but also by political choice.

The UK authorities, under David Cameron’s government, selfconsciously repeated the eurodollar strategy of their forebears. The City of London would provide China and its banks with a platform to globalise the yuan.

The British banks are significantly more exposed to China than their European and American counterparts. This promises profit. But it involves a double risk.

The eurodollar world that took shape in the 1960s mapped neatly on to the outlines of Nato. It had Washington’s assent. It was, as we say nowadays, a geo-economic bloc. The same cannot be said for Britain’s China venture.

London’s obsequiousness towards Beijing was not lost on Washington. As one American official remarked off the record in 2013, constant concessions were no way to confront a “rising power”.

With that phrase he burst open the final framing assumption of the passing era: the comprehensive pacification of great power relations created by the victory of the US-led alliance in the cold war.

This had allowed the story of global economic growth to be thought of as neutral with regard to power politics.

Already, under Obama, that was no longer the working assumption of US policy. China’s growth was increasingly viewed as a source of threat.

The strategy of the Cameron government to seek partnership with China raised the question: where in a future world order did Britain stand?

In retrospect, it throws stark light on the astonishingly high-risk strategy of the Cameron administration.

At the same moment that it was putting Britain’s relationship with Europe on the line, it was antagonising Washington with a strategy of co-operation with a state whose power and self-confidence is growing by the year.

Beijing talks a good game over globalisation, but, especially under Xi Jinping, it views politics, grand strategy and economics as an integral whole.

It is also, however, fragile. China’s credit boom is unprecedented. The setback it suffered in 2015-2016 shook the world economy.

As both the Bank of England and the IMF have warned, along with Britain’s financial exposure to China comes serious risk.

If a China meltdown is the great tail risk that hangs over the world economy, then the City of London, as it was in 2008, is likely to be the first western domino in line.

And that will not be a matter of fate or market logic, pure and simple. It will be the result of deliberate strategic choice.

Saturday, 28 July 2018

More than 15 weeks after I had again been due to stand trial, I now no longer have a trial date, even though it is rightly a criminal offence to fail to attend one's trial.

Had I been tried, as expected, on 6th December, then, even had I been convicted, I would already have been released, since I would by now have served even the whole of a wildly improbable six month sentence.

The legal persecution of me, which has been going on for over a year, was initiated only in order to deter me from seeking public office or to prevent my election to it, and its continuation is only to one or both of those ends. Amnesty International is on the case.

Until there is anything to add to it, then this post will appear here every day that the post is delivered.

The Leader of Durham County Council, Simon Henig, was so afraid that I was going to be elected to that authority, that he faked a death threat against himself and dozens of other Councillors.

Despite the complete lack of evidence, that matter is still being pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service as part of the attempt by the sacked Director of Public Prosecutions, Alison Saunders, to secure a Labour seat in one or other House of Parliament.

If I am wrong, then let Henig and Saunders sue me. Until they do, then this post will appear here every day that the post is delivered.

UKIP never won a parliamentary seat except with a sitting defector from the Conservative Party, it only ever did that twice, both of those MPs went on to lose their seats to the Conservative candidates, and one of them is himself now a Conservative member of the Welsh Assembly.

Nigel Farage has so far failed to enter the House of Commons on no fewer than seven occasions, UKIP now hangs with the Tommy Robinson crowd, and the Conservatives lost their overall majority when they bizarrely decided to counter Jeremy Corbyn by reviving talk of grammar schools and foxhunting.

Therefore, we know for a fact that there is no electoral constituency to the right of the Conservative front bench. No one knows that better than Conservative MPs themselves. So there might be a new "centrist" party, but there will not be a UKIP Mark II.

After all, who paid for UKIP Mark I? The EU, that's who. Such is UKIP's dependence on the funds that are made available to Members of the European Parliament, that it is impossible to see how it could survive the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union.

Over the years, Britain, America and Israel have all set up Islamist rivals to Nationalist movements, frequently losing control of them.

The EU did not set up UKIP as a rival to the real anti-EU forces on the Left and in a section of the traditional Labour Right, forces whose arguments did in fact swing the areas that went on to swing the referendum precisely by rejecting UKIP's Thatcherism in one country after having already experienced it for 39 years.

But it might as well have done. And unlike, say, Shin Bet and Hamas, or the CIA and the Mujaheddin, but more like the Foreign Office and the Muslim Brotherhood, the EU has very far from lost control of UKIP. For all the use that such control is now, but there we are.

Rather than any such foolish distraction, there is going to be another hung Parliament, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. I need £10,000 in order to stand for Parliament with any chance of winning.

My crowdfunding page has been taken down without my knowledge or consent. But you can still email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com instead, and that address accepts PayPal.

It tolls for thee. It always tolls for thee. This is one of several reasons why Stephen Guy of the decidedly non-adolescent, non-hipster Durham Miners' Association needs to be elected to the Labour Party's National Executive Committee and to its National Policy Forum. By all means vote for eight NEC candidates of your choice from the "official" Left slate, or for seven and Ann Black. But make sure that you also vote for him.

As for Hoey, Field, Graham Stringer (who would also be a loss) and John Mann (rather less so), they made a tactical calculation that would not have been mine, as it was not Dennis Skinner's or Ronnie Campbell's. It is simply impossible, by definition, to be more Euroscpetical than those two, and least of all if you are still away with the myth of Margaret Thatcher.

Saving a Conservative Government, and especially one as bad as this, is a very bad look for a Labour MP, and keeping Brexit in the hands of Theresa May and Olly Robbins, instead of Jeremy Corbyn and everyone who would come with him, is if anything an even worse look for a Brexiteer. But if the Blairites are permitted to purge the traditional Right, then they will not stop there.

Mercifully, though, there is going to be another hung Parliament, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. I need £10,000 in order to stand for Parliament with any chance of winning. My crowdfunding page has been taken down without my knowledge or consent. But you can still email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com instead, and that address accepts PayPal.

Fake news is of very real concern. There have been seven recessions in the United Kingdom since the Second World War. Five of them have been under Conservative Governments. That party has also presided over all four separate periods of Quarter on Quarter fall in growth during the 2010s. By contrast, there was no recession on the day of the 2010 General Election. And now, the Conservatives have more than doubled the National Debt. The Major Government also doubled the National Debt. Yet the Conservatives’ undeserved reputation for economic competence endures. They are subjected to absolutely no scrutiny by the fake news detractors of their opponents.

Other examples of fake news include the official versions of events in relation to Orgreave, Westland, and Hillsborough. All manner of claims made by, or in support of, the Clintons. The alleged murder of 100,000 military age males in Kosovo. The existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and their capacity for deployment within 45 minutes. Saddam Hussein’s feeding of people into a giant paper shredder, and his attempt to obtain uranium from Niger. An imminent genocide in Benghazi, Gaddafi’s feeding of Viagra to his soldiers in order to encourage mass rape, and his intention to flee to Venezuela. An Iranian nuclear weapons programme. And Assad’s gassing of Ghouta, as if that were an undisputed fact. In every case, that was fake news. Or, in plain English, lies.

David Lindsay, 2017 council candidate and 2020 parliamentary candidate, Lanchester, County Durham; @davidaslindsay

George Galloway, former Member of Parliament for Glasgow Hillhead (1987-1997), Glasgow Kelvin (1997-2005), Bethnal Green and Bow (2005-2010), Bradford West (2012-2015); @georgegalloway

The 2017 council election was stolen, and the 2020 General Election never happened, at least in the ordinary order of things, but my campaign goes on. I need £10,000 in order to stand for Parliament with any chance of winning. My crowdfunding page has been taken down without my knowledge or consent. But you can still email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com instead, and that address accepts PayPal.